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1 March 2022

The latest cohort of Jisc community champions is an inspirational group of people who go above and beyond their usual roles in further and higher education to collaborate and share experiences for the good of all.  

Their efforts to build communities not only cascades good practice, but also boosts wellbeing, by creating a sense of shared purpose, togetherness and support. In the words of one champion, Samantha Ahern from University College London:  

“Community recognises our humanity; we are stronger together than alone. Our realities are socially constructed, and if we want to change them then we need to work together to imagine and construct new realities.” 

Ahern is one of 17 champions selected by a panel of community representatives and Jisc staff from a pool of more than 60 nominations.  

Celebrating impact beyond expectation 

Paul Holland, associate dean for student learning and experience at Swansea University and a member of the selection panel, explains why community champions are so valuable: 

“Some FE/HE staff have a calling to work beyond the boundaries of their paid roles. They actively bring people together and find common solutions to the wider issues that all education institutes grapple with. Recognising them as Jisc community champions helps value that extra effort and willingness to serve.  

“As recognized leaders they are empowered to go further with the confidence they are doing the right thing. Emerging from the pandemic, the importance of such visible role models cannot be overstated.” 

The community champions were asked what motivates them, why community is important and what it means to be recognised. 

Creating a sense of belonging 

Chloë Hynes, who helped to develop PDNorth, an online community for practitioners in FE and skills, commented: 

“Community is necessary for professional development (and wellbeing) because it provides a sense of belonging within a sector that can very often feel disparate, isolating, and inconsistent.”  

PDNorth started as a programme funded by the Education and Training Foundation to facilitate exchange networks in the north of England. Hynes wanted to do more, so developed a space for practitioners to amplify their work via a monthly newsletter, YouTube channel and blog.  

When the funding ended in summer 2020, Hynes kept giving her time because she believed in the ethos of practitioners being in control of their own CPD. PDNorth now has 100% practitioner-led content and has been renamed as FE tapestry.  

Angela Dynes, from Northern Regional College, who was nominated for advocacy in the library sector, added: 

“For me, community is about having a sense of belonging and bringing people together to not only achieve goals, but to feel part of something that we all care about.  

“Community can help us to cultivate skills that we may not have realised we had. It’s also about being comfortable to express thoughts and generate new ideas about what we may value and how we can make things better for everyone.” 

Collaboration for the good of the sector 

Collaboration is also important for the champions. Joshua Vicente, who works at University of Exeter and was nominated for his role as a volunteer mentor in the Prospects Discord Virtual Careers Fair, explained: 

“Instead of working alone, we can achieve something far greater and more meaningful through collaboration, and that there are those out there who appreciate the work that goes into these communities.” 

Vicente’s contribution aided the career development and learning of hundreds of early careers leaners. The community encourages communication without boundaries, inciting conversation between people who otherwise may not have been able to engage. Vicente is credited with inspiring pre-students and motivating graduates in sharing his knowledge of the IT careers market. 

Enhancing education 

Ben Haddock was nominated for hosting meetups from Sandwell College’s ‘Fab Lab’. These live sessions and recordings share learning about teaching across a range of platforms and were a lifeline for practitioners through the pandemic. Haddock said: 

“I strongly believe that everyone deserves to have a fantastic and stimulating education - and I hope that, through our work, we can encourage more educators to innovate and experiment. Little changes are no longer enough - we must find ways to deliver education in profoundly different ways than ever before.” 

Recognising value, time, and effort 

Community champions show us that by bringing people together we can make a difference. They do not do it for recognition, but it is important that they are recognised.  

Head of community engagement at Jisc, Natasha Veenendaal, who founded the programme, explains:  

“We see the power of collaboration across all FE, HE, and research. Members are supporting one another to expand learning, solve problems and improve the lives of others. It’s a privilege to get to know and celebrate those people. We hope that the community champions programme goes some way to show them how much they are appreciated.” 

The benefit of recognition was echoed by champions. Matthew Deeprose, who works at the University of Southampton and was nominated for work related to accessibility, said: 

“For me, the benefit of recognition is the hope that it brings validation and credibility to the work and aims of the community in the eyes of decision-makers and budget holders. Communities can build momentum from the ground up, but sustaining change requires buy-in and investment from the top.” 

Building a community focused future 

The champions will be coming together at Jisc’s annual edtech conference in March, Digifest, as community facilitators. They will also be sharing their experiences in an online community fringe session in early April. 

Jon Hofgartner, assistant principal, digital technologies at Weston College and member of the selection panel, reflects: 

“As I read the wide range of nominations for Jisc community champions, I was struck by the breadth and depth of community building activities and commitment to creating better outcomes and experiences for our students. My hope is that our selection of Jisc champions will leave a lasting legacy in FE and HE sectors, demonstrating the power of ‘community’ in education.”  

Further information 

• A full list of champions, finalists, and nominees for 2022 is available on the Jisc website.   
• For anyone running a community, see the support on offer and how to get in touch. 
• Join a community group or find out more about how to get involved.

Tony Bates, Online learning and distance education resources, Mar 01, 2022

Tony Bates offers a response to my paper on connectivism. Unsurprisingly, he does not agree with the position I outline. He argues that "any theory of learning... needs to go beyond the mechanics of physiology" and to explain "consciousness and thinking, rather than wondering what neurological reactions are happening." He also argues that "there are serious questions about his explanation of how networks learn." For example, he asks, "what do the nodes actually contribute to the network other than sending signals?" He is also dissatisfied with my treatment of pedagogy and argues "to ignore the social and economic factors that influence teaching, learning and the construction and use of knowledge." (p.s. and for the record: I was not "home tutored". I spent 13 years in the Ontario public school system, another year in community college, and then an additional nine years as a university student at the Universities of Calgary and Alberta. I have since then built on that base, but I am no more of an "auto-didact" than Bates is). Anyhow, I offer a reply to the first part of the review, with (probably) more to come.

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Anya Singh, Geek Culture, Medium, Mar 01, 2022

I thought that this was a relatively good article in that it explores a number of features of web3 that go unmentioned by others (and critics especially). But I think we need to be clear that we can talk about web3 without talking about crypto-currencies (like bitcoin or ethereum), just as we could talk about web2 without talking about PayPal or advertising. 'Play to earn' models and NFTs are the web3 equivalents of affiliate marketing and commercial e-textbooks. The web2 or web3 model makes them possible, but it doesn't make them necessary. But it is true that while "web2 is about communication and sharing (like Instagram and Facebook), web3 is about creation and ownership where users can retain control."

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The American Association of Colleges and Universities has embarked on a statewide project with the Utah System of Higher Education to evaluate student performance on civic outcomes.

Sarah Perez, TechCrunch, Feb 28, 2022

There have been various attempts over the years to make asynchronous interactive audio a thing, but this effort has the feel of something more substantial than previous attempts. By pushing a button in the iHeartRadio app, listeners record a 30-second voice message. This message then becomes available on the app's CMS "so the voice recordings are available to use, live on air, within about 10 seconds after sending." I'm not sure I'd broadcast them live without listening to them first so it seems to me that iHeart's next step will probably be to offer an audio transcription 'preview' so broadcasters can read what the message says before deciding to use it.

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A fall 2021 capstone marketing course at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville's Haslam College of Business used virtual reality as a regular delivery modality.

A new survey of K–12 human resources professionals shows that districts’ top priorities have shifted from COVID-19 procedures and online learning to teacher recruitment, staff well-being, and teacher retention, amid a growing focus on professional development access for teachers and administrative tech solutions.

Upcoming events include the Future Trends Forum, SXSW EDU, and Rutgers Online Learning Conference.

I have a surprise for you. I can’t share all the details yet, but it’s going to be fun. And Blursdays will be a part of it.

Argos, my new start-up with co-founder Curtiss Barnes and a killer little team, is receiving a major two-year grant working with a university partner to invest in open-source software that will, among other things, help improve OER. And we’re going to crowd-source some of the design and improvement work. I can’t provide all the details yet because we’re still working with the grantor and the partner on finalizing the details for the official announcement. But the basic idea is that we’ll be developing software in the first year that will help us test improvements in OER (among other things) in the second year.

And we want you all to be involved.

So here’s the plan for the three-week reveal:

1. This week, we’ll review a demo of the Argos vision which some Blursday regulars may have seen, but with an emphasis on the aspects that are important for the project and the bigger picture.
2. Next week, we’ll show the software as it exists in 1.0 form today—in production for several thousand students!—so you can get an idea of the base we’re working from.
3. The week after that, we’ll have our big reveal of the grant and talk about how we want to enlist your help. (Fingers crossed that the final bits of paperwork will be signed and press releases approved by then.)

From there, we’ll use some Blursdays as barn raising sessions to get your help in designing the open-source software and organizing OER improvement hackathons. I’ve always intended to bring Blursdays together with the Empirical Educator Project (EEP) and we now finally have the perfect (funded!) project for it.

We will still have Blursday Social events with the familiar format, and the Barn Raising sessions will have a social component too. (Hence, the name.) Fun and impact! Plus, some surprises and special friends are coming.

Please RSVP for our first Blursday Barn Raising this Thursday, March 3rd, from 4 PM to 5:30 PM ET.

The post Blursday Barn Raisings! appeared first on e-Literate.

Downes, S. (2022) Connectivism, Half an Hour, 9 February In an earlier post I gave an overview of Stephen Downes’ latest update of his theory of connectivism. My first post was purely factual, if selective. Here I will give my views on the theory, at least as the theory stands at the moment. It’s taken me a […]

The post A review of Stephen Downes’ latest contribution to the theory of connectivism first appeared on Tony Bates.

Michael Feldstein, e-Literate, Feb 27, 2022

Michael Feldstein writes a long post saying he doesn't know very much about web3 but that it probably won't help education very much. Now having offered a MOOC on web3 as it was back in 2019, I think I can say that I do have a pretty good understanding of it, both at a technical level and at a social level. Now Feldstein's article is valuable in that it raises many of the questions and confusions people have (for example, he should know self-sovereign identity tokens not only allow people to manage their own logins, they also enable zero-knowledge proofs, which means people can validate credentials without giving out personal information). But I will say that this probably isn't the time for a Economy 2.0 statup - not in a world of content-addressible decentralized resources.

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Richard Byrne, Free Technology for Teachers, Feb 26, 2022

What I like about NASA (aside from the obvious thing about space exploration) is how well it does outreach and learning resources online. I consider it a model of what other scientific agencies (including the one where I work) could do to advance interest and engagement in the field. This page points to a number of free NASA resources that illustrate what I mean here.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

It’s been a while since I’ve written much on e-Literate. Sorry about that. I’ve been super busy with my new start-up, Argos Education. I’ll be doing more again soon; here, on the Argos site, on Blursdays, and so on. I thought I’d start today with a warm-up post.

Rebecca Koenig published a piece in EdSurge a few weeks about the potential for Web3 in higher education. Koenig is a decent journalist who gamely tries to tackle a genuinely confusing topic. Something about decentralization and taking the internet back from big corporations (while possibly giving it to other big corporations) and stuff like that.

I don’t claim to have clarity or answers about Web3 yet but I do have two hypotheses:

1. Blockchain, the technology upon which Web3 is premised, doesn’t add a whole lot to the ability to decentralize education in ways that were not possible before.
2. In any event, the real challenge with decentralization isn’t the technology. It’s the humans. Blockchain doesn’t really help there in any way that I can see.

What the heck is Web3?

To be completely honest, I don’t know and I’m not convinced anybody else does either.

At the core of it is something called blockchain, which is the technology that underlies cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin. I won’t try to reproduce the many good explanations of the technology that are available elsewhere, but the key benefits are (1) it provides a transparent chain of custody for digital artifacts and (2) that chain of custody is part of what enables the recipient to be confident that they’re getting what they’re told they’re getting and that it hasn’t been tampered with.

Beyond that, there’s a lot of hype about decentralization of…um…everything? A lot of the hype in web3 (and in education, as Koenig covers in her piece), is around something called Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs). DAOs are often painted as the ultimate culmination of the gig economy in which everybody works for themselves, forming virtual organizations as needed.

No, I’m not sure that I get how blockchain makes that possible either. But we’ll return to the potential usefulness of this theoretical affordance momentarily.

Another idea that gets a lot less attention but may be more useful in EdTech is the notion of “self-sovereign identity,” The basic notion is that you can control your digital identity (or identities) and not have to rely on “log in with Facebook.” Which, hey, I’m all for. The only meaningful Web3 use case that I’ve seen actually implemented in education so far is ASU’s reverse transfer effort, which uses self-sovereign identity. (Again, I won’t get into the details here.)

Whenever a hyped concept like Web3 hits, I try hard not let myself get either too spun up or too turned off by the hype. Instead, I try to imagine what the thing could be good for and test out the idea in my mind.

So far, the answer I’ve come up with for Web3 is “ummm…?.” As far as I can tell, Web3 solves the wrong problems for education. I could easily be missing something. It wouldn’t be the first time and it won’t be the last. But none of the ideas I’ve heard so far make much sense.

Coase vs. Conway

If we want to think about humans working together in decentralized ways, it helps to look about both existing theory and existing practice. Let’s start with the theory.

Why do organizations exist? The leading theorist on this question is economist and Nobel laureate Ronald Coase. In two seminal articles—”The Nature of the Firm” and “The Problem of Social Cost”—Coase argued that companies (and other organizations) exist because of transaction costs between actors, including the cost of planning, deciding, changing plans, resolving disputes, and so on. If we could do all the things that organizations to…um…organize at low enough cost without employees, then there would be no organizations. For example, companies exist when it’s cheaper to create a corporation, hire and pay employees, etc., than it is to coordinate among a bunch of freelancers all working together.

The idea of lowering transaction costs to eliminate command-and-control structures is hardly new. In 1884, Karl Marx’s collaborator Friedrich Engels wrote,

The society which organizes production anew on the basis of free and equal association of the producers will put the whole state machinery where it will then belong—into the museum of antiquities, next to the spinning wheel and the bronze ax.

Friedrich Engels, Origins of Family, Private Property, and the State

And of course, the idea of collectives or communes is considerably older than that. Organizations, after all, are human inventions. Humans existed before formal organizations were invented and humans have continued to collaborate without them in many different situations.

Technology can lower transaction costs and makes new kinds of organization possible. In his 2002 paper “Coase’s Penguin: Linux and The Nature of the Firm,” Yochai Benkler argued that open-source software has been made possible by (1) free digital copying of goods (e.g., source code) and (2) the lowering of coordination costs made possible by electronic communications. More recently, we’ve seen the rise of the gig economy, with gig jobs ranging from Uber drivers to social media influencers, enabled by technology.

The question is, where’s the limit? What sorts of organizations can be broken down by technology-enabled lowering of transaction costs and what sorts can’t? How does that apply to education?

Before we get to some practical answers, it’s worth looking at the other side of the coin from Coase. Far less well known than Coase’s Theorem is Conway’s Law. It’s been expressed differently at different times, but its simplest formulation is this:

Any organization that designs a system (defined broadly) will produce a design whose structure is a copy of the organization’s communication structure.

Melvin Conway, “How Do Committees Invent?”

Conway is a software engineer. He observed that, for example, when an organization had three different departments all working on parts of the same piece of software, the software would end up being developed in three modules. And the quality of the communication among the modules would be similar to the quality of the communication among the three groups.

Note that this is within an organization. Even the transaction costs within an organization are non-zero. Planning is hard. Coordination is hard. Human behavior is hard. Technology can help sometimes but, fundamentally, this is a biological thing. Clever monkeys with blockchain are still just clever monkeys.

So how much can technology facilitate some kind of decentralized education? Also, why is that a goal?

Coase’s graduation gown vs Conway’s learning object repository

To get at the first question, let’s look at the examples from Koenig’s article.

First up is a quote from Vriti Saraf, founder of a startup called k20 Educators:

“Universities are curators of content,” Saraf says. In the past, she explains, in order to get a Harvard education, “I had to go through Harvard; I couldn’t just go straight to a professor.” But in the future, she predicts, “Harvard could still be curating classes of professors, but it’s not Harvard’s intellectual property.”

What Could Web3 Mean for Education?

First of all, this is not very radical. Harvard would still exist. Its certification of a credential’s value would still be the coin of the realm. Freelance professors exist today. They’re called “adjuncts,” and many of them don’t love the version of the gig economy they live in. Of course, at a place like Harvard, they have “visiting professors,” “entrepreneurs in residence,” and so on. That’s a better gig economy to inhabit. In fact, it’s so much better than contracts are often negotiated individually to meet the needs of the in-demand superstars. And Web3 makes this easier…how? There’s a bit in here about intellectual property ownership, but here again, it’s not clear how the tech helps with that change.

Saraf continues with a second idea:

“For a very long time, our credentials have focused on grades and the name of the verifying institute,” Saraf says. “Instead, what if we focused on the output and performance you’re able to gain? If I took a class on robotics, I could put the actual robot [coursework] on the chain, not the grade. People could track the process, and it’s a much better indicator of who I am and what I learned.”

What Could Web3 Mean for Education?

This would be like a portfolio. Except electronic. An electronic portfolio. We could shorten it to ePortfolio. Catchy, right?

I wrote a piece about the confusing nature of ePortfolios as a product category in 2006. That was before companies perfected the technology to scan résumés for keywords, having humans look at even less of what students do rather than more. Most companies I’ve seen that actually look at the work of prospective employees do so in the context of a challenge they set up as part of their interview process. In other words, they want to watch the prospects working at a task the employer has designed to be relevant. With the exceptions of career niches where portfolios were used even when they were analog—e.g., architecture, fine arts, and education—ePortfolios never caught on. The cost of human-evaluating a portfolio is too high for most employers and most jobs. I don’t see how blockchain or Web3 change that.

The next example from the EdSurge article is longer, more complex, and probably not worth analyzing completely. It’s The Crypto, Culture, & Society DAO, which aspires to be “an experiment in building an educational institution directed by learners, not administrators.”

Oh. Like a book club. Or a study group. Or Udemy. Wouldn’t it be awesome if Web3 could make those things possible?

To make the group financially sustainable, the DAO plans to sell NFTs that grant owners access to future courses, plus provide educational services to other DAOs. Some of the non-fungible tokens will be reserved as “scholarship seats” for people underrepresented in the crypto world, Patel says. And for the general public, the group wrote up summaries of its first-semester courses and made them available for free.

What Could Web3 Mean for Education?

They could call these “tuition,” “financial aid,” and “open educational resources.” Imagine a world in which we had those things….

The next example in Koenig’s article is something called EduDAO. I hesitate to critique it because I really don’t understand it. Seems like it could be a way of organizing and funding student funding groups. Which would be a good thing. But yet again…I don’t get what Web3 adds here.

Of course, a story about Web3 hype wouldn’t be complete without an example that includes the “metaverse,” a concept that always works out super well in science fiction books and movies. (I’m sure Facebook—sorry, Meta—will make it even better.)

Imagine a virtual version of New York City, where everything is open 24/7 and geared toward teachers’ needs, desires and crypto-wallets. That’s what Saraf, of k20 Educators, says she’s building. She calls it the Eduverse.

In the Eduverse, teacher avatars will teleport around to digital edtech hubs, where they can learn new technology skills to add to their credential chains. They’ll pop into marketplaces, where they can, say, trade lesson plans they’ve created for tokens. They’ll check out career centers where they can look for new jobs. And they’ll relax in lounges, where they can chat with fellow teachers from other countries.

“The purpose is to create this live, central location where educators around the world can connect with each other,” Saraf says.

What Could Web3 Mean for Education?

So, basically, it’s Teachers Pay Teachers. In Minecraft. With Bitcoin. (Or Ethereum. Or Dogecoin. Or Educoin. I can’t keep up.)

Very serious transitional side question: How the f*ck do these things get funded?

I (hope I) don’t get it

I’m not saying there is no use case for Web3 in education, but I am saying that I haven’t seen one yet and am having trouble imagining what one would look like (other than ASU’s aforementioned reverse credit transfer, which is not really what the Web3 enthusiasts have in mind).

I don’t get the excitement.

Unless I do.

The most obvious (and saddest) explanation is that there are two forces in play here. The first is our primate instinct to travel in groups. Gartner’s hype cycle exists for a reason. People get excited, and then other people get excited because they trust the people who are getting excited. And then still other people get excited because everybody else is getting excited. After which, disappointment, financial failures, and copious amounts of grifting ensue.

Sometimes an “innovation” emerges out of the Trough of Disillusionment and eventually reaches the anticlimactic Plateau of Productivity. (I vacationed there once. It was kind of boring, but I got a lot done.) Other times, the idea drops from the Trough of Disillusionment into the Marianas Trench of Bad Ideas We Shall Never Speak of Again. It’s hard to say which way Web3 will go this early in the hype cycle. We’ve just barely reached “WHEEEEEEE!”

The second force that may be at work is the techno-libertarian mindset of Silicon Valley, which seems to have reached new heights. Never mind that freedom, in this case, may mean freedom to move from our Facebook overlords to our Etherium overlords. This is a kind of crypto-“Atlas Shrugged” libertarianism (where “crypto” is not meant in the technical sense). It’s a return to “disrupting education.”

I’ll be among the first to admit that our education system is a hot mess. It’s a thousand-year-old system that certainly wasn’t designed and hasn’t really evolved so much as it has accreted over time, layer by layer, with the lower layers never really being changed so much as they have been driven deeper into the invisible foundation.

That said, having just spent the better part of two days trying to figure out the very basics of how to set up a Facebook—sorry, Meta—page for my wife’s forthcoming book, I have a hard time believing that the geniuses whose crowning socio-technological achievements to-date are creating massive stock market volatility and selling cartoons for tens of thousands of dollars are going to replace our current educational system with something better. Somebody is going to have to make a pretty good case to me.

I’m open to listening. Some of the people I’ve talked to about talking Web3 in education are really smart folks who I respect and who genuinely care deeply about education. I will continue to hear them out.

It’s just that no specific proposal I’ve heard so far makes sense. I don’t mean that I’m hearing bad ideas. I mean the ideas I’m hearing literally do not make sense to me. I do not understand them. All I hear is “blah blah blah something that already exists or shouldn’t exist blah blah Web3 blah awesome!”

Blockchain from XKCD

Maybe something good will come out of all this that I don’t see coming. For now, I suggest sitting it out and waiting for Web4. Which I hear is going to be awesome and is going to change everything. It will be self-driving, have 5G, and William Shatner will show us how it works live, from space, without having his wig float away.

Genius.

The post Web3 in Education Isn’t Very Interesting appeared first on e-Literate.

Infosys Foundation USA has launched a new Springboard digital skills initiative in the United States to provide educators, students, and aspiring professionals with free training and instructional content in computer science, and it includes expanded computer science, coding, and design lessons for K–12 students; streamable coding lessons for K–5 classrooms; and professional development content for teachers to learn how to teach computer science with no prior experience in the subject.

Advanced Distributed Learning, Feb 25, 2022

This item was posted last September but it showed up in my feed reader only today, and it's certainly worth passing along. It describes cmi5 (EduTech wiki says "cmi5 probably stands for computer managed instruction, fifth attempt"), which has been in the works for a number of years now. If I had to summarize it in a sentence, I would say that cmi5 basically takes SCORM and combines it with xAPI. In other words, it describes the conditions for launching and running a learning resource, and includes information about how to record the activities undertaken using that learning resource. For more, see the cmi5 catapult, "a freely available, open-source cmi5 content player and cmi5 conformance test suite for use by DoD stakeholders or and other e-learning technology vendors."

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

Shishir Mehrotra, ProductHunt, Feb 25, 2022

This is the listing on ProductHunt for Coda 3.0, a document editing tool that features a large number of integrations with other applications and pre-packaged templates for them (called 'packs'). I devoted an episode of Stephen Follows Instructions to it. It's an hour and 20 minutes long, but it covers everything. If you want to see how to approach a new application and learn it from scratch on your own, watch this video and observe my process as I work through the options, make assumptions, and try things out. Would I actually use this product? Well, I like it a lot, but all of your data is stored on their service, and there's no way to export it at all. To me, that just creates too large a risk, and so I would never use it as an authoring platform.

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Gavin Inglis, Teaching Matters blog, Feb 25, 2022

This is yet another 'how we responded to Covid' article. But I want to include it here to demonstrate how much more useful it is posted as a blog post than published in a $169 textbook few will read. We also find it reflects some understanding of online learning prior to 2020. "Rather than simply recording his existing lectures, David opted for a more compressed format inspired by podcasts. He broke the material into 15-25 minute tightly scripted chunks that students could consume in whatever way suited them." Also worth noting: "the focus group found that requiring a raised hand to speak, whether real or virtual, gave the meeting more structure than an in-person, organic discussion, and made space for everybody to express their view." I've always preferred that approach for any group more than a few people

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Lisa Cranston, The MEHRIT Centre, Feb 25, 2022

This article is a reminder that, in a way, some things never change. The 'stickers' in question are things like the gold stars handed out four students to display somewhere (the fridge, the wall, the lunch box). They're the pre-internet version of badges. The gist of this article is that teachers should avoid the use of stickers, for two major reasons: first, because they are based on "assuming that the child has full control of his or her behaviour and could demonstrate the desired behaviour if they wanted to, but sometimes choose not to do so"; and second, because "when we incentivize behaviour, we run the risk of extinguishing pre-existing intrinsic motivation." Via Doug Peterson.

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Tony Bates, Online learning and distance education resources, Feb 25, 2022

Tony Bates reviews Fayed & Cummings (eds) (2021) Teaching in the Post Covid 19 Era. I'm not about to shell out $US 169 for this book, even if that works out to around $2 per chapter. As he says, "no-one is going to read this 764 page book from end to end. Readers are going to dip in and out." He also suggests that though it offers "many examples here of innovative teaching, particularly using synchronous technology," the lack of a comprehensive index, unifying themes, or sense of organization mean it's really basically a list of related articles. Also, readers "would think that online learning was invented in March, 2020. Very, very few of the articles made any reference to all the 30 years of research." Finally, as Bates says, "the real problem here is not online learning, but what are increasingly outdated and ineffective lecture methods, which become even more ineffective when transferred online without modification. That surely is one of the most important lessons from the pandemic." The other - to me - was the value of open publishing. Too bad all this work will remain hidden from view, with nobody but the most dedicated (like Bates) reading it.

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Louisa Rosenheck, eSchool News, Feb 25, 2022

Honestly, I think it's cheating a bit to make predictions for the year in the last few days of February, but that's what this article does. And reading them, they feel more like predictions of what publications will write about, as opposed to what will actually happen in the field. For example, the idea of the metaverse isn't new and won't actually make great gains in 2022, simply because it's expensive and time-consuming and takes a lot of work to get even minimal results. The discussion of critical race theory, the second concept raised, will continue, but while equity and inclusion are important issues generally, the efforts to suppress discussion of race will again have minimal impact on actual practice, except maybe to raise awareness a little. The great resignation, concept number three, could have a significant impact where teachers are undervalued and underpaid. The same could be said about the idea of pandemic heroes. Will any of these "shape education"? No.

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